About Shop Talk

Welcome to the Shop Talk blog of The Chicago Manual of Style!

With these pages and posts, the editors and staff of the Manual hope to bring clarity, education, and amusement to anyone who works with words.

And we want to hear from you! We know the thousand-plus pages of The Chicago Manual of Style can be daunting. Many readers send us style and grammar questions via our Chicago Style Q&A. Here you will have more ways to join the conversation through our Shop Talk Community Chats, our Suggestion Page, and the Comments feature of selected posts.

In this expansion of our original Q&A page, you will find our usual monthly interviews with publishing professionals, new help pages especially for student paper writers, and a range of regular and special features, such as

Since the very first edition of CMOS in 1906, we have stressed the need for judgment and flexibility in applying the Manual’s guidelines. Here at Shop Talk, where editors and writers talk about their work, we hope to shine some light on that process.